The heart of this book is a temple built in the Tamil-speaking South in the late 9th or early 10th" century CE, at Tiruccennampunti, near Trichy. Now abandoned, that temple is one of the earliest known Saiva temples of the Cola period. The evidence gathered here suggests that this shrine, dedicated to Siva as "the great god of Tirukkataimuti", was raised in honour of a deity who is lauded in the Tevaram (7th_9th centuries), a poetic anthology of the earliest surviving Tamil Saiva hymns. A Pallava queen, Marampavai, whose inscriptions are engraved on pillars found half- buried on the site, was the most prominent among its early patrons. The difficulty pinning down her complex identity echoes the difficulty of defining the site, which seems like a missing link connecting different corpora of evidence: poetic texts, epigraphs, carvings, Pallava monuments and Cola-period art.

The site is therefore explored here in three ways: by an attempt to define "Cola art" while acknowledging the contribution of Pallava royal temples and monuments raised by minor dynasties which call into question the use of any such dynastic label; by an investigation of the relation between the world of texts and that of archaeology through the study of one particular iconographic ensemble and one epigraphical corpus; and by an examination of the relation between royal and local, particularly in the realm of "Bhakti". As a woman active in this region who claims in Tamil inscriptions to be a member of a Pallava family famed for its Sanskrit epigraphy, and who appears more closely linked to a merchant community than to Brahmins, Marampavai crystallises the encounters between several worlds. The divine realm is not the least complex of them, for Visnu, Brahma and female deities are an integral part of the sacred court of the Siva wedded to this place.

About the Author

Charlotte SCHMID has been a member of the Ecole francaise d'Extreme-Orient (EFEO) since 1999. She first worked on the earliest North Indian figurative representations of one of the principal figures of Hindu bhakti, Krsna, produced in and around Mathura, Over the past dozen years and more she has been able, thanks to the manifold help of all the people working at the Pondicherry Centre of the EFEO, to study the representation of Hindu deities in the Tamil-speaking South, which she has explored in search of inscriptions and sculptures produced during the Pallava and the Cola periods, in other words from the 6th to the 13th century.

The heart of this book is a temple built in the Tamil-speaking South in the late 9th or early 10th" century CE, at Tiruccennampunti, near Trichy. Now abandoned, that temple is one of the earliest known Saiva temples of the Cola period. The evidence gathered here suggests that this shrine, dedicated to Siva as "the great god of Tirukkataimuti", was raised in honour of a deity who is lauded in the Tevaram (7th_9th centuries), a poetic anthology of the earliest surviving Tamil Saiva hymns. A Pallava queen, Marampavai, whose inscriptions are engraved on pillars found half- buried on the site, was the most prominent among its early patrons. The difficulty pinning down her complex identity echoes the difficulty of defining the site, which seems like a missing link connecting different corpora of evidence: poetic texts, epigraphs, carvings, Pallava monuments and Cola-period art.

The site is therefore explored here in three ways: by an attempt to define "Cola art" while acknowledging the contribution of Pallava royal temples and monuments raised by minor dynasties which call into question the use of any such dynastic label; by an investigation of the relation between the world of texts and that of archaeology through the study of one particular iconographic ensemble and one epigraphical corpus; and by an examination of the relation between royal and local, particularly in the realm of "Bhakti". As a woman active in this region who claims in Tamil inscriptions to be a member of a Pallava family famed for its Sanskrit epigraphy, and who appears more closely linked to a merchant community than to Brahmins, Marampavai crystallises the encounters between several worlds. The divine realm is not the least complex of them, for Visnu, Brahma and female deities are an integral part of the sacred court of the Siva wedded to this place.

About the Author

Charlotte SCHMID has been a member of the Ecole francaise d'Extreme-Orient (EFEO) since 1999. She first worked on the earliest North Indian figurative representations of one of the principal figures of Hindu bhakti, Krsna, produced in and around Mathura, Over the past dozen years and more she has been able, thanks to the manifold help of all the people working at the Pondicherry Centre of the EFEO, to study the representation of Hindu deities in the Tamil-speaking South, which she has explored in search of inscriptions and sculptures produced during the Pallava and the Cola periods, in other words from the 6th to the 13th century.